The Gods' Day to Die

by David Welch

  “Later, Arty,” Zeus said. “Let’s get settled first.”

  She nodded, took a deep breath, then kept going. They circled down the terrace, passing countless tunnels. Most were covered in the sculptures of people long gone. Some snaked off into the mountainside, others ran short distances and opened into smaller chambers. As the terrace descended, more and more large chambers opened from the main cavern. It seemed counterintuitive to Desmond, as less and less rock was clearly holding up the more solid mountain above them. But he figured if it had lasted six thousand years, it must be up to the task.

  The main cavern was about seventy yards across at its base, the walls and floor all of a dull, gray rock. Stalagmites dominated the center, most of them twice as high as a man. Water dripped down on them, then trickled into drains that had been carved into the floor. Around the edges dozens of wooden crates were scattered about. At least three large chambers attached to the main cavern, each several stories high. A pair of snaking passages also branched off into the mountain. One had been finished off, like the inside of a house. Plastic walls had been put up to hide the rock, and bright light shone from overhead lamps. Numerous steel doors lined the hall.

  “Home sweet home,” Zeus grumbled.

  “Olympus doesn’t exactly live up to the name,” Desmond said.

  “The one on Olympus did,” Artemis said.

  “You should’ve seen this place before the plastic,” put in Ares.

  They split up, Ares and Zeus moving toward one of the side galleries, everyone else heading to the “living” area. Hera prodded Duscha along, the barrel of the gun never leaving the girl’s back. Hera directed the girl to one of the first doors. Desmond followed Artemis farther down, three doors in, and went with her into a room.

  He found himself in a bedroom, about as large as a standard hotel room, but homier, done up with tapestries depicting hunts and nature scenes. The type of thing Artemis liked. A large bed dominated the center. On the far side of the room, a small bathroom was visible through an open door. A couch, a coffee table, and two chairs lay between it and the bed. Large wardrobes stood against the wall.

  “Well, this is my room,” she said. “Daddy doesn’t usually let me bring boys up here.”

  “Funny,” he said, dropping his backpack and rifle on the bed. He stared around the room for a second. “Now what?”

  She shrugged.

  “Now, we wait, I guess,” she said. “Ares will want to set this place up for a fight. And everybody’s probably going to want to walk through their section of the cave before this goes down.”

  “Their section?” he said.

  “Our loved ones are grouped by person,” she said, frowning. “Makes it easier to find them when we want to remember them.”

  “I see,” he said gravely. “So you’ll need some time . . .”

  “Later,” she said, the weight lifting from her face. “There are other things I want to do before this happens. Just in case.”

  Her smile left nothing to the imagination. He rolled his eyes.

  “You’re insatiable,” he said.

  She sidled up close to him, working on his belt.

  “Maybe I’m feeling a little dangerous today,” she said, pushing him back onto the bed. “My dad is just down the hall . . .”

  He grinned, and pulled her lips against his.

  When he awoke, her weight lay against him. Her fingers drummed aimlessly on his chest. He glanced about, seeing nothing but black. He didn’t know if it was actually night, but it certainly was in here.

  “How long did I sleep?” he asked.

  “An hour or so,” she said.

  “Huh,” he said, thinking. “You know, I always thought ‘last-fling-before-you-die’ sex would be something earth-shattering.”

  “But it never really is,” she said. “Trust me, I know.”

  “Not that you aren’t the best I’ve ever had,” he said. “You’re spoiling me, raising all my expectations.”

  “Such a cross to bear,” she said, then shifted in bed. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  “How are either of us going to find the light switch in here?” he said, staring into the blackness.

  She clapped twice, and the room illuminated.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” he said, sitting up in bed.

  “Come on, get dressed,” she said, jumping to her feet. Desmond’s mind didn’t register the words at first, what with her being naked in front of him. Realizing he wasn’t moving, she looked back and rolled her eyes.

  “And you say I’m insatiable . . .” She sighed. “Get up. It’s time to meet the family.”

  He dressed, as did she. When she was done, she rifled through her backpack, pulling out the book with the pictures of all her past lovers and children.

  “You’re talking about . . . ,” he started uneasily.

  “Yes,” Artemis said. “You can say it, Des. It’s not like I don’t know. They’re dead.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, showing me past husbands . . .”

  “You gonna get jealous of a statue?” she said. “Man up. Besides, if Ares is right and we all end up in Heaven together, it’ll be better if you know them. Help smooth things over.”

  He looked at her as if she’d grown a second head.

  “Are you serious?” he asked.

  “No sense of humor today, I see,” she said, grabbing him by the wrist.

  “Well, we are in a tomb,” he replied.

  She led him out of the room and back into the main cavern. Zeus and Ares had laid out a small arsenal’s worth of weapons and ammo, and were checking everything over. They breezed past them, heading for the spiral terrace. From below, it looked all the more impressive. The cavern was wider at the top than the bottom. The path had been hewn out of the side walls of the cavern, cutting huge gouges in the rock. If it had truly all been done by hand, then it must have taken decades or more.

  “Gawk later,” Artemis said, chiding him into motion.

  They made their way up the terrace, about halfway to the top. Artemis paid little heed to the passages they went by. She knew exactly where she was going. Des, however, tried to take all of it in.

  “How big is this place?” he asked, as they passed yet another cave branching off the main chamber.

  “Huge,” she replied. “Runs under most of the mountain. And that’s just the caverns we’ve accessed. Go down five hundred feet and the caves flood, but they keep going. Who knows how far.”

  “And your family’s knowledge of these caves gives you the tactical advantage,” he figured.

  “That’s the plan,” she replied, slapping the wall of the main chamber. “Know almost every inch of this place. There are at least two dozen wide-open chambers, though none bigger than this one. And countless passages snaking all over the place. Honestly, I’m surprised the mountain stays up, given how hollow it is down here.”

  “Reassuring,” he said.

  She walked a little farther, then came to a stop at the mouth of the tunnel she had noted on the way down. Actaeon’s stone visage stood near the opening.

  “Hello, everybody,” Artemis said, a bittersweet smile on her face. “Meet Des.”

  She walked into the cave. Des followed a second later, finding himself surrounded by sculptures. None stood out more than four inches from the walls of the cave. Each was life-sized, except nothing had been carved below the knees. Instead, recesses had been cut into the rock and filled with mementos.

  “Everybody you saw in my book is here,” Artemis said. There was a trace of sadness in her voice, but on the whole she sounded strangely content. As if being able to visit them here meant they weren’t really dead.

  “Who carved these?” he asked, passing by her first family. The children all seemed to take after Actaeon.

  “I did,�
�� she said.

  “You sculpt?”

  “Amazing what you can learn when you have forever to learn it,” she replied. “We all carve our own.”

  “And the words around each statue?”

  “Life story,” Artemis said, stopping at one. “My second husband, Gr’thr’dk. Member of a tribe on the steppes that modern archaeologists have never heard of. Great man, but his people didn’t use vowels much. Made naming the kids hell.”

  She turned to the opposite wall, where a beautiful young woman, the spitting image of Artemis herself, graced the rock.

  “Ty’vrj’kn,” she said, a proud smile crossing her face. “My first baby girl. Actaeon only gave me boys.”

  Des looked at the image of the young woman, watching Artemis caress the stone cheeks of her daughter’s statue.

  “They all look young,” he said.

  “Would you want to be immortalized as a broken old fogey?” she said. “Ty was thirty-seven when she died.”

  “Old for the time?” asked Des.

  “Not quite old, but close,” Artemis replied. “Ty’s husband lived until his late forties, and that was pretty normal. Sadly, my little girl died the way most women died then.”

  “Childbirth?” Des guessed.

  Artemis nodded, her smile dampening a little.

  “It was her twelfth child. Can you believe it? Survive eleven births without a hitch, then have complications with number twelve?” Artemis shook her head.

  “Sorry,” he said, realizing in the back of his mind that he was offering condolences for a woman who’d probably died over five thousand years ago.

  “It’s okay,” Artemis said. “She was lucky. The baby survived, lived a long life. Hard to believe, but she lost only three of her kids in childhood. A miracle, considering the time.”

  She moved down farther. She looked at each sculpture and wistfully ran her fingers across many of them, but she didn’t stop at each one.

  “I think you would’ve liked this one,” she said, stopping in front of the image of a young man. He looked a bit like Artemis around the eyes, but nowhere else.

  “Who is this?”

  “Peloais,” she said. “Fathered by some soldier after Ares and I fought a particularly nasty battle in what’s now northern Italy.”

  “You don’t remember the father?”

  “I never knew his name,” she said. “I was drunk, we were all shocked to be alive, what with being outnumbered four to one and all. But he left me with this force of nature.”

  Des looked on. The man wasn’t particularly large, and had fairly average looks.

  “You see, Peloais was one of my few unplanned children,” she said. “And he scampered all around Olympus, living the life of a god despite his mortality. Like most of my mortal kids, really. But unlike them, he had the temerity to fall in love with an immortal. Cerridwen.”

  “Oh,” Des said. “Cerridwen, of course.”

  She noticed his sly smile, and matched it.

  “She lived in what’s now Wales. Convinced some of the locals she was a divine enchantress. They used to say she had a cauldron that inspired poets.”

  “Yeah,” he said with faked confidence. “I knew that.”

  “Right . . . ,” she said. “Well, anyway, Cerridwen had an ego the size of a small continent. And she wasn’t going to lower herself to sleeping with some mere mortal, even the son of the Goddess of the Hunt. So for years Peloais did everything imaginable to impress her. Even saved her life once. But nothing worked.”

  “So how did he get the girl?” asked Des.

  Artemis shrugged casually, then said, “He killed her husband.”

  Des nodded, trying to keep his eyes from bugging out of his head.

  “Tried-and-true method,” he replied sarcastically.

  “Oh not like that,” Artemis said with a wave. “Her husband, Tegid Foel, was another immortal. He was also an abusive bastard who beat her regularly, beat their two immortal children, and would cheat on her with anything on four legs. One day he nearly beats Cerridwen to death, over some stupid spat. Peloais got so mad when he saw what happened that he marched in and killed him. How, I’ll never know. Foel was eight hundred years old at the time, and knew how to handle a sword. Cerridwen hadn’t really understood how much Peloais loved her until that point, and let’s just say her ego got cut down to a more manageable size.”

  “And they lived happily ever after?” asked Des.

  “More or less,” Artemis said. “She gave him five children, and stayed by his side until he died. She was never picky about taking a mortal husband after that.”

  They went on like this for nearly an hour, stopping every so often so Artemis could relive the exploits of her children and lovers. They passed her first female partner, whose beauty made Des’ mind fill with incredibly erotic images when he imagined her and Artemis together. They passed conjoined twins whose sculptures were of them as babies, because they hadn’t lived past their third year. A disturbing number of the sculptures were of children, since even having an immortal mother did not guarantee living to adulthood. This caused Des to whisper a murmur of thanks to the universe that he’d been born when he had. They passed a son born with mental retardation, who’d been lucky enough to have an immortal mother who could look after him all his life. They passed countless families, and numerous husbands and lovers. Some were warriors, others were hunters like her. A few were craftsmen of various types: potters, masons, carpenters, and such. As Des went, the inscriptions changed alphabets and languages. The story of each of these individuals was carved in the language of their time. Des couldn’t help but think that if some archaeologist stumbled upon this place millennia from now, they’d probably consider it the ultimate Rosetta Stone. Toward the end they passed a man in eighteenth-century dress who looked strangely familiar. Des figured it was the Founding Father she’d been married to, but couldn’t for the life of him place the man. He shrugged. At least it wasn’t Hamilton.

  Where the statues came to an end, a familiar face graced the wall. It was Diving Eagle, her son by Crow Foot, his face a mixture of Native American and Caucasoid features.

  “That’s everyone,” she said.

  Desmond turned from the young man’s statue, looking deeper into the cave. It extended into the mountain, curving out of sight fifty yards or so away. The sides had been smoothed out, ready and waiting for the next additions.

  “I get the feeling someday I’ll be staring out from the rock,” he said, decidedly uneasy about the prospect.

  “No,” she replied. “You won’t.”

  His head swiveled around.

  “I don’t make the cut?” he said warily.

  “Desmond, if we die here, nobody will be left to carve our images. And if we don’t, I intend to get the treatment and live a mortal life at your side. And many decades from now, we’ll die and be buried next to each other in some cemetery in Colorado,” she said confidently. “I’m not putting anyone else on this wall.”

  The thought made him smile. She took his hand.

  “We should get back,” she said. “I’m sure Ares and Dad want to work out a game plan.”

  “One thing before that,” he said. “What do you do when an immortal dies? Where are they in this labyrinth?”

  She nodded. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”

  They returned back to the main cavern and followed the terrace up another fifty feet. There they came to another tunnel, similar to her own area. The walls were covered with bas-relief sculptures on each side.

  “This is Aphrodite’s tunnel,” she said, leading him inside. The tunnel was similar to the one they had just left, though there were more words crammed in around the sculptures. Apparently Aphrodite was a bit more verbose in her memorials. About halfway down Artemis recognized one of the sculptures, and stopped.

  Des
mond focused on the image. It was a young man who strongly resembled Ares.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  “Phobos,” she replied. “One of Aphrodite’s sons with Ares. An immortal. He lived thirteen hundred years before he got himself killed in a Roman civil war.”

  Desmond looked around. The memorial was no different than those of the man’s mortal siblings.

  “There is no difference, Des,” she said. “When this man was alive, he was my nephew. So were most of the men in this tunnel. Think about your own parents. When they were alive, and you were young, they were part of your life. There, ever-present, a given. Then . . .”

  “They went away,” he said.

  “It’s the same with us. I knew, logically at least, that my mortal children and relatives would die long before I did. But while they were here, they were a given, they were family. So was Dionysus. And now they’re gone.”

  “And the world feels wrong,” Desmond said.

  “It’s felt wrong to you for how long? Since your parents’ deaths?”

  “Yes,” Desmond replied immediately.

  “It has felt wrong to me for a long time,” she said. “Doesn’t matter how long they were at your side or what subspecies of human they technically were. When they’re gone . . . they’re gone. And nothing ever feels quite right again.”

  “And they’re all in here? All the immortals?” he asked.

  She frowned, saying, “Most of them. Odin’s family lived in Scandinavia, Conn’s in Ireland. When word came of deaths, we carved memorials for them. But mostly this is us. Zeus’ family and their children. The ones modern society knows as the ‘Greek’ gods. They’re all here.”

  Desmond looked to the left of Phobos, seeing a teenage girl who looked remarkably like him.

  “Even the ones who didn’t survive?” he asked.

  Artemis looked at her feet, struggling to keep her composure.

  “Yes,” she said. “The last seven statues you see are all sons and daughters of Aphrodite and Ares. Ones that didn’t make it.”